TAMINO RELEASES DEBUT ALBUM ‘AMIR’

“He carries with him a sense of experience it takes most artists years to develop.” – Happy Mag

“really interesting… beautiful” – Richard Kingsmill, triple j

“There are few voices that strike you so deeply when you first hear them that they quite literally take your breath away” – Wonderland

“The dark and tender songwriting of Tamino is the most beautiful thing you can listen to this Fall.”- Les Inrockuptibles

“Few voices make you stop in your tracks. For some, it only happens once or twice in their lifetime, to hear something with a visceral, immediate power so unique that it seems otherworldly. Tamino is one of those voices.” – The Independent

Tamino releases his much-anticipated debut album, ‘Amir’ via Communion Records / Caroline Australia. Of Belgian, Egyptian and Lebanese heritage, the 21-year-old musician has written and shaped an album of startling, visceral, sit-up-and-listen power – it is as if the singer has arrived, out of nowhere, fully formed.

Musically, it is like so much pop today, all over the place, uncategorisable, impervious to considerations of style, fashion and commerce. In that sense, it is totally now. At the same time, there is something so other-worldly, so defiantly individualistic, about Tamino’s songwriting, his octave-traversing voice, ethereal falsetto and Arab tonal inflections, that attempting to categorise them seems futile.

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve sung like that,” the singer says. “Very early on, I realised I had this range, and that I could play with it; I never felt that I should sing in just one particular register.” The aim has, Tamino emphasises, always been to find unusual combinations, to join the dots and in the process locate new sounds and textures.

Four of the tracks that feature on his debut EP, Habibi, find a home on Amir too including “Indigo Night” featuring Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood on bass. It’s an album of a variety of different shapes and textures, delivered in a soulful and sultry croon by a young musician with a striking, extraordinary talent. ‘Tummy’ slinks brightly, the ying to ‘Verses’ folky yang. Whilst on other tracks like ‘Each Time‘, ‘Intervals‘ and ‘So It Goes‘ the Arabic influences shine through as melodies lilt over the quarter notes rarely touched in Western music It’s mood music, painted in a number of different shades.

The record was produced by PJ Maertens and Jo Francken, and recorded predominantly in Maertens’ house in Courtrai, Belgium, and Audioworkx studios in Holland.

Also joining Tamino across Amir is a collective of Arabic musicians based in Brussels called“Nagham Zikrayat”. The Firka (orchestra) is predominantly made up of professional musicians (these players were reasonably well known in their home countries) from the Middle East, most of which have refugee status having predominantly fled from Iraq and Syria. To fit these new players into the studio, they headed to Jet Studios in Brussels.

Most of what else you hear on Amir however, is almost exclusively Tamino. The vocals, the guitars, the piano, keys, synth, bass, oud, and some programming too which was shared alongside Maertens.

There are a number of different themes that thread themselves throughout the album, almost on opposite ends of the spectrum, which Tamino examines: “A very important theme on Amir is the conflict between blinding romance and dissipating nihilism.”

“Some songs on Amir are more on the romantic side, while others are more on the apathetic side,” he says. “In my own life I can look at the world and at life in both ways depending on my state of being. Also, how this conflict creates an imbalance. A lot of the album is about balance too.”